I have a passion for technology and a love of nature, so whenever I find a way to marry the two together thats a good idea. A kindred spirit is Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ken Adelman. After he founded and sold two very successful technology companies, he decided to embark on an environmental project of a lifetime The California Coastal Records Project detailed at CaliforniaCoastline.org.
Adelman is photographing the entire California coastline from the helicopter piloted by his wife Gabrielle and posting all the images on CaliforniaCoastline.org. Their goal is to keep track of all development by snapping high-resolution photos every 500 feet along Californias 1,100-mile coastline.
The Sierra Clubs Coastal Program calls the Adelmans work one of the greatest high tech projects to protect the California coast in all time.
Kenneth Adelman, founder of the California Coastal Records Project, recently talked with me about his work to keep the public eye tuned in to preserving our West Coast as well as some recent controversy over a photo that includes a certain celebritys house.
Q: How did you come to start CaliforniaCoastline.org?
Ken: My wife and I have been doing environmental photography for a Sierra Club attorney for many years. We started in 1997 when we volunteered the use of our helicopter to take photographs to help fight the Hearst Corp. from developing a huge resort complex at San Simeon Point. Since then weve done a lot of photography for the Sierra Club where we took a picture of something after it had been destroyed and wished we had a before picture.
We were joking once over dinner that the only way to get a before picture would be to photograph the entire coast. At the time it seemed daunting, but eventually the technology of digital photography advanced to meet the idea.
Q:What bad things have you discovered while photographing the California coast?
Ken: We discovered an illegal seawall being built at the Ritz-Carlton at Half Moon Bay.
Q: How did you actually accomplish getting the 12,000 images from your camera to CaliforniaCoastline.org?
Ken: Our first idea of was to shoot it in film. We thought it would be 10,000 slides and wed store them in shoeboxes. That just didnt seem appealing. It was when we decided that using film was really stupid that we finally started the project.
Our camera was a Nikon D1x. Its about a 5 megapixel digital camera. There were a couple of features it had which were critical to the project. The camera can connect directly to a GPS receiver, so this allowed each file that was produced by the camera to capture the GPS position of the helicopter in the frame. Everything you ever wanted was right there: altitude, longitude, latitude. That allowed us to extract the data and build all the indices for the Website automatically.
Q: What kind of feedback are you getting from your efforts along the coast?
Ken: We see our role as providing the data and we dont necessarily know how its being used. We know environmental-ists think its the most exciting thing since sliced bread, primarily because they had a need for aerial photography all along but had never been able to afford it.
Q: Since you are very successful financially from founding two software companies during the dot-com heyday, your philanthropic efforts have given them this gift.
Ken:I think its important to recognize that we photographed the entire California coast for very little cost. We think we did the whole project for about $50,000, the helicopter operating costs being the largest part of it. It also includes six servers that are serving the Website and the camera. I dont think a government organization could have done a job like this for ten times that cost.
Q: Tells about your most recent challenge with a certain celebritys home on the coast.
Ken: The celebrity is Barbara Streisand and shes suing me, my Internet service provider and Pictopia which is the company that offers reprints off our site, claiming that weve infringed on her privacy under a California anti-paparazzi law. The law is about taking pictures of people, not places or buildings. If you read her lawsuit, shes trying to get the court to read in buildings where it isnt.
Q: If that was the case, then there are so many more egregious errors than what youve done.
Ken: And there are satellite photos of her house if you go to Terraserver or MapQuest. It turns out there are some people in the very right hand side of our picture on the beach. You can go to see the picture for yourself on our Website and look at those people and you can barely tell if they are male or female. We were about 540 feet in the air, about a half a mile away horizontally.
Prior to her filing the lawsuit there might have been some months where there were nine to 15 people looking at that photo. That photo didnt attract any more attention than any others. The day the news of her lawsuit broke we got over 100,000 hits that day. There are some ways to protect your anonymity, but suing is not one of them.
For more information about Kenneth and Gabrielle Adelmans California Coastal Records Project and their legal situation with Barbara Streisand, visit CaliforniaCoastline.org.
Dana Greenlee is co-host, producer and engineer of the WebTalkGuys Radio Show, a Tacoma-based radio and Webcast show featuring technology news and interviews.
